Homeschooled and sheltered, what a shame

A common cultural theme is to blame hedonistic immoral behavior on a sheltered upbringing. The idea is that once the homeschooled or private-schooled child grows up she is inevitably overwhelmed by twerktastic “reality” and goes feral.

This cultural theme serves two purposes. First, it provides a ready-made excuse for people of weak character who were given all the advantages of an orthodox upbringing and squandered it. Second, it blames the parents and shames the communities who dare to attempt to bring children up in a healthy environment.

Other parents use this argument to shame parents who are sheltering their kids. I am the recipient of this all the time. We do not have television, for example, and I get a lot of negative comments about how we are sheltering our children so much that they will surely freak out and go crazy when they get out into the real world.

One day I was angrily relating to my husband what another woman had said to me about my refusal to let one of our daughters see a certain movie with her daughter. Her comment was, “They’re going to learn about this kind of thing sooner or later.” I was constructing all these elaborate reasons why children should be sheltered, and my husband interrupted me and said, “Later.” Huh? “Later. If they are going to learn about it sooner or later, then I choose later.” The simplicity of his argument lifted a weight off my shoulders. Later.

shelter is the new abuse

Hah, yes it is. This goes along with the suspicion that all homeschoolers are literally physically abusing their children, too.

I like “Later”, but if you’re long-winded, give them a blast of 1 Peter 4:3-5: “For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.”

With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you

This is one reason why the “it doesn’t affect you” retort is hogwash. Abstaining from bad things or even merely keeping silent about them is a sign of contradiction, and evil is always looking for accomplices.

I would like to echo HHG’s sentiment of “later.” The later children find out about certain things, the better, if they have been reared to develop a strong moral compass and sense of introspection. Under those circumstances, whatever things they find out will have to go through their moral filter first, and thus hopefully be immediately flagged as questionable at an unconscious level. To go along with this, that kind of skillset takes time to develop. Hence, Later.

This was a common scenario in college. Girl (or rarely, guy) goes wild, parties hard, stays drunk, sluts around, etc. and blames it all on having a sheltered upbringing or never having the chance to get it out of her system.

Usually, it was the ones who were already rebellious and willful and just took a chance to go even further when they were out from under their parent’s authority. In a permissive home, they wouldn’t have turned out OK – they would have been knocked up or down with STDs at an even younger age, but their lack of morals extends to blaming their parents and church/culture rather than taking responsibility for their choices.

The mistake home schooling parents make is not marrying their daughters off between 16 and 18. Instead they thrust them into the university system and women immediately emulate the herd of women around them. There should be no gap between a women living in her father’s home and a women living in her husband’s home.

It would be far less of an issue if the university system were predominantly male because sluttiness in college is heavily influenced by female competition for men. What we have is a system where the “quality men” are already a minority of a minority in college and what we need is a system where men have to man up by fact of circumstances if they want a woman.

I don’t think environment overwhelms the personality. I am a naturally an introverted autistic girl/woman, and I did not engage in teenage bacchanalias or engage in other debauchery as a teen or as a young adult simply because I do not gravitate towards those social occasions and sensual experiences. I did it two times in college though two people who were a close friend and academic rival, but it was approached rather deliberately (not impulsive based on overwhelming sexual attraction nor was caused by drugs removing our inhibitions) to prevent any complications such as pregnancy and STDs, and the circumstances were mutually agreed upon as we were intellectually mature adults, unafraid of drawing the ire of God, who were aware our actions can have adverse consequences and wanted it done in quiet, private setting. After it was over, my “partner” did not ever discuss the “event” with each other and he did not desire another encore, nor did I as I was quite indifferent about it, but we still enjoyed some scientific and philosophical discussions. He said that I looked “cute” and agreed that I looked and acted like an adolescent girl who possessed intellectual acuity and strong capacity for sympathy, but we both lacked the voracious appetite for it nor do I arouse any sexual passion.

Certainly a life of depravity will be spiritual vacuous and distasteful to God as the testimony of a person in a Catholic young adult that I met with attests. Still, I believe that if I were not autistic or high introverted, I would be more vulnerable to the influences of hedonistic culture, but I was, for the most part, not affected by it because my personality confers me a resistance to it, even though I then lacked any religious piety. I still think sex is a such strong impulse that religious upbringing and a sheltered environment cannot completely suppress. As children grow older, they tend to select their own environments and peers free from the strictures of any parental or religious authority, making it nearly impossible for children to shelter them.

I would bet that HBD (innate personality) factors have a greater influence than childhood environment.

Latias:Still, I believe that if I were not autistic or high introverted, I would be more vulnerable to the influences of hedonistic culture, but I was, for the most part, not affected by it because my personality confers me a resistance to it, even though I then lacked any religious piety.

It is an interesting point that introversion and personality can be as strong a barrier to the hedonic impulse as upbringing. The old nature-nurture debate can never really be resolved, because it is both/and not either/or.

Well, since religious preference, political orientation, and sociosexual orientation are, for the most part, genetically determined, it would make sense that homeschooling would be selective of certain types of individuals. It’s more of behaviour driving belief than the other way around. That said, I don’t see how two sexual partners would be suggestive of repression, rather, closer to the opposite. Atheists still wait until marriage, of course (as evidenced by wtm.org), but in lower numbers than Christians. Unsurprisingly, religiosity is not the best predictor of chastity, but rather variations in dopamine receptors.

We went from being wonderful parents (adopting and raising a sibling group of 4) to being horrible abusers because we dared try impose significant structure on them. We did have a TV and computers, but we still controlled what they could do to a significant extent.

I am sure they and others would claim this kind of “extreme control,” when it was merely standing against the spirit of the age.

They all choose the way of their birth family and are proceeding to mess up their adult lives, but not much we could do about that.

I did not know any young men my daughters could have married at 16, so I am not sure that is a great idea. The problem is that society doesn’t encourage restraint, so even being married would not solve the problem in and of itself.

[Had to rescue this comment out of the SPAM folder. Welcome to the blog, BradA.]

As a convert to the Catholic Church, I would say that pre-conversion, I certainly did not see myself as susceptible to religiosity, but I believe it was through the grace of the Holy Spirit that I was able to believe.

The “dopamine receptor” hypothesis should have some implications that render it testable. However, dopamine receptor expression can be mediated through environmental effects in addition to genetics influencing protein sequence and gene expression, so one would need genetic data to associate some biological effect with a genetic etiology.

The naked materialism of much of the ‘sphere is hilarious, and hilariously naive.

Can you expand on this?

The “dopamine receptor” hypothesis should have some implications that render it testable. However, dopamine receptor expression can be mediated through environmental effects in addition to genetics influencing protein sequence and gene expression, so one would need genetic data to associate some biological effect with a genetic etiology.

Also, I believe there is indeed a materialist explanation, but it would seem that since the most the heritability in psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia have not been discovered, it does not seem likely that genetic variations in dopamine signalling (involving metabolism of dopamine, the receptor, and the downstream components of dopaminergic signalling) plays a large role in those pathologies because they would have been discovered and assigned a high proportion of those diereses’ heritabilities. It is indeed likely dopamine plays a role in this disorders, especially schizophrenia, because antipsychotics remedy some of the positive symptoms in part by a blockade of the DRD2 receptor. I also recall while writing this and reading the titles of your references (after a mile and half run) that one side effect of antidepressants of the SSRI class is sexual dysfunction. However, similarly, inhibition of HMG-CoA synthase by statins produce a profound therapeutic reduction of LDL, but polymorphisms of that gene account for little of the heritable variance in cholesterol levels. Thus, even if dopamine signalling plays a necessary role in sexual behavior, based on other cases, it does not lead one to conclude that genetic differences in dopamine signalling play a predominant role in sexual behavior.

Other parents use this argument to shame parents who are sheltering their kids. I am the recipient of this all the time.

We got this a lot as well with our older children, and they were enrolled in public school! People who let their teenagers run wild get very defensive around parents who refuse to go along with the trend.

When I was a teenager I was not allowed to leave the driveway in the hours between the time I got home from school and my dad got home from work. And the senior citizens around the neighborhood kept eyes on the house for my parents. No one came, and no one went.

I was the butt of so many jokes. I’m 42, and if I run into an old school chum and the conversation drifts back to “remember when…” it still comes up. That, and how much we went to church.

It would be easy for me to blame the weakness of my character that emerged when I left home on my father, but that’s a cop out and worse, it leaves no room for true repentance.

The issue isn’t so much what in particular causes differences in sexual behaviour, but that genetics does indeed have a large impact on sexual behaviour. Besides that, sexual behaviour is a primitive function.